Because It Mattered...
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| From Morguefile |
Last December we had a community dinner at the Tidioute Church. It was kind of a spontaneous idea that came up at our November board meeting: "Could we just invite people to come to a free dinner for Christmas?"
"Invite who?" I ask, 'cause that's what I do.
"Well..." I see what's going on. Sure, we could have a church dinner. Been there done that. We could invite family and friends... But, well, they'll have Christmas dinner. Who might not?
"We just got the list of who will get food baskets for Thanksgiving. That's..." Papers shuffle and some quick counting. "...about 35 families...about, wow, about a hundred people."
"We could send invitations."
"Hey," someone says, "we could hand out invitations at the food pantry in December, too."
"That's maybe another hundred people."
We stare big-eyed for a minute at the thought of 200 or more people filling our fellowship hall that holds 80 on a good day and then someone says, "Let's do it. We can invite people. God will figure it out."
And in the intervening weeks we did a little logistical work - got some food together, made sure we had people there to set up tables and get the food cooked. Printed and mailed the invitations. Got the invitations to the food pantry.
But every time someone asked me about helping I had a ready answer.
"We hope that there will be people here that we don't know. The most important thing we can do is sit near them, introduce ourselves, welcome them, eat with them and talk with them. Listen. Let them tell us about who they are. Do everything we can to make them feel welcome." Hospitality would be the key.
It was a lot of fun in the kitchen that afternoon, getting in each other's way, getting to know one another better. We goofed in a bunch of ways - too much of this and mis-communicated that. But it was all good. No whispers in the corner and sidelong glances. Lots of laughter and "Well, we shouldn't do that next time."
And when dinner time came, sure enough people we don't know showed up. Oh, and some people we DO know, too, of course. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen about 20 minutes into the dinner and looked out and there wasn't a single table full of just church people. Everybody, everywhere, eating and talking and laughing. Then, yes, I grabbed a plate and sat down and joined in a lively conversation with a couple ladies at a table and made a connection that I will follow through on soon.
No, we didn't get 200 people. It wasn't standing-room-only. We had about 30 people or so from the community join us for dinner. A few ate and left quickly. Most lingered and joined in conversation.
"We can do this again." I heard that so many times that night. "We should do this regularly. Monthly. We should figure out how to do that." A theme from Saturday night. Not because it was easy. It wasn't.
But because it mattered.
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